Beyond the top five list, the Foundation and its media partner The New Stack drilled into the following categories: Hypervisor/Container, IaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Configuration and Management Tools, and Storage.

In hypervisors, KVM, which is built into Linux, was the top virtualization program with 48 percent. After that came Docker, which while not "virtualization" software per se, has turned containers into today's hot virtualization-like technology. After that Xen took the third spot. Xen's placement struck me as a little odd since Xen is not only one of the oldest open-source virtualization programs and, because it forms the foundation for the Amazon cloud, is easily the most used hypervisor in the world.

In IaaS, once you're done with OpenStack and CloudStack, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus take up the next two spots. The other IaaS projects are lost in the noise.

PaaS is another area with a clear leader. Here it's Red Hat's OpenShift with 54 percent of the vote. After that comes CloudFoundry with 36 percent. Past the big two, no other PaaS platform really has a significant presence.

It's really the same story in storage. Ceph leads the category with 49.6 percent of the vote. After that Gluster comes in second with 20 percent and OpenStack's Swift had 17 percent.

When it comes to DevOps tools, it's a dogfight. Sure Puppet is number one with 23 percent, but it's followed closedly by Ansible with 18 percent; then SaltStack with 13.3 percent; JuJu with 10.7 percent; and finally Chef with 10.4 percent. I think DevOps is still wide open and no one has established themselves as the clear alpha dog yet.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system; 300bps was a fast Internet connection; WordStar was the state of the art word processor; and we liked it.His work has been published in everything from highly technical publications...
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